Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Woody Allen's new film, announced as a romantic comedy, is far superior to the disastrous Match Point and Cassandra's Dream (Scoop, his second London film, has yet to be shown here), but much inferior to his best work. It centres on the adventures of two broadly defined young Americans in Spain, film-maker and photographer Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) and graduate student Vicky (Rebecca Hall), who, despite her limited knowledge of Spanish, is writing a master's thesis on "Catalan identity".

The reckless Cristina is up for anything, the cautious Vicky is soon to marry wealthy businessman Doug. When romantic artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) approaches the two women in a smart restaurant, proposes sex with both and issues an invitation to join him on a private plane to Oviedo the following day, they accept. Vicky has a one-night stand with him on the trip while Cristina becomes his live-in lover back in Barcelona. Complications ensue when Juan's ex-wife and fellow artist Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz) returns and sets up a menage a trois.

The movie presents itself as a worldly-wise study of the impermanence of love once passion has disappeared and one thinks at first of early Allen and of Eric Rohmer. But it's little more than a reworking for the post-permissive era of the first big CinemaScope romance, Three Coins in the Fountain, and rather less fun. There's the same plot of American girls bowled over by European culture and the same brightly lit touristic background. If I remember right, a suave Italian in the earlier picture flies a couple of girls in a private plane from Rome to Venice to impress them.

The girls are attractive (though there's a sense of them being ogled) and the men are dull. As a piece of film-making, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is on the slack side, the long two-shots of people conversing tiresomely repetitive. The biggest disappointment, however, is the absence of irony, visual jokes or verbal humour. The constant voiceover commentary (by Christopher Evan Welch) sounds like the scenario that preceded the screenplay. It makes the movie more tell than show and has the tone of an excited round-robin Christmas letter sent to her chums by a well-heeled, poorly educated American girl after her first holiday in Europe.